Brève traversée

I saw this at the Auckland International Film Festival this year and with so little spare time I had to really be picky and selected what I thought was the 10 best films including `Y tu mama tambien' (which received critical acclaim). Personally I thought this was the best.

This film is set on an overnight ferry trip across the English channel, it begins with a chance encounter between two lone travellers, namely a 16 year old boy Thomas and a middle aged woman Alice. Seasoned lone travellers will know that keeping company with other lone travellers is a good way to pass time. This is how their relationship develops. Thomas wants what most young men his age want, a sexual encounter. Alice on the other hand portrays herself as a sophisticated yet vulnerable woman surviving a mid life crisis. Sounds like a volatile combination right? Well you will have to see this film to the end, which has one of the best endings I can remember.

Now some notes about the cast and crew. This film introduces Gilles Grippon (Thomas) and he plays his role well, a teenager trying to be cool yet unsure of himself and impressionable. Sarah Pratt was absolutely gorgeous and stunning as Alice. She really held together those scenes sans the dialog when the couple were just exchanging glances. This film is not wholly a French language film as English is almost equally spoken throughout. Sarah has an excellent command in both. I am surprised so little is known about this beautiful and talented actress. I hope to see her in more films to come.

This is the fourth Catherine Breillat film I have seen and the best so far. Like all her other films she deals with the character's sexual intricacies but it does not have the pornographic taint of `Romance', the violence found in `A Ma Soeur!' or any of the disturbing scenes found `A Real Young Girl' (one of her early films but only recently released because it had been banned). Also well translated on screen especially with the use of lighting is the feel of being on the channel ferry. Having been on one myself it brought back memories.

I would love to own this on DVD if it ever comes out. 10/10

"Roastbeef. No chips". Something commonplace like this marks the beginning of a short relation between a woman and a young boy. A woman, who lost all her illusions about love and marriage. A young boy, attractive for the woman because he still is naive and innocent. It is especially the role played by Sarah Pratt that puts this film on a high level. Returning to the trivial roastbeef-and-chips-scène at the beginning of the film: the way Pratt argues with the waiter: "I don't want them!". That's great acting. With simple means and with only two persons that really make this film Catherine Breillat has done very good directors work. Placed in the chilly décor of a ferry boat two people attract each other and have something - something what? You can't really call it a love affair. What they do have together during the few hours of the boat trip looks tense, reliable and sometimes moving.

After watching "Romance" and "The Anatomy of Hell", I felt like I had reason enough to believe, Catherine Breillat prioritizes sex and depressing visuals so much, the subtle things she tries to prove take backseat. But after watching Brief Crossing, my conception underwent a drastic polarity shift.

Thomas is a 16 year old seemingly typical French boy. Alice is probably British, and is around 30. Looks like she had a lot of dimensions to her that she lost from a years long slow heartbreak. Thomas thinks the usual social institutions like boyfriend-girlfriend relationships can't inhibit the French from satisfying their carnal needs any longer. Seems like he does not readily realize the gravity of what he says.

Sometimes, when a child is born in a battlefield and brought up in the neighbourhood, he looks at wars with the eyes of an innocent. He sees deaths, but does not realize what it is that seems so obvious like the sun and the moon. One day, a bullet hits him and the next moment, he is not innocent any more. Brief crossing is one such crossing. Crossing from sight to comprehension. Crossing from ideas of pain to pain itself. Crossing from Innocence to Awareness.

Brief Crossing, like a few others of its kind like "The Man from Earth" or "Broken English", depends solely on a few people's expressions. Not even an extra penny has been spent on refining anything that is not totally essential to help the movie reach its end. Of course it's not for everyone to watch. But those who like it once, will not forget it ere long.

Not recommended for general viewers or cinegoers. Highly recommended for "those" few.

There are plenty of good writers, at least it seems so. But not very many good filmmakers.

Obviously, this is somewhat due to the nature of film-making being a collaborative enterprise that involves large numbers of people. Where it seems to impinge most is in beginnings and endings. Readers need to make only a little adjustment to be coaxed into a different space, and the unwinding or knotting at the end is also easier, though more challenging.

Film requires the viewer to make more severe adjustments in entering the world that's fabricated. And very few seem to have been able to figure out endings that work.

Put this together and you'll see why we have some filmmakers that have great skills at creating "middles" but are disasters elsewhere. Brelliat is one of these, possibly the most fascinating. Set aside that all her films explore the same space. That's not fatal. When she gets us to where she wants, she can often assemble a tableau that is as effective as anything in film.

Very troubling and touching stuff, that. Immediate and emotional. But she takes such a torturous route to set it up and place it in that special zone. Lots of uncinematic talking and preparatory narrative. Then we'll have her sometimes sublime state.

And then without fail, we'll have a messy ending. Not well conceived. So she plays the youth card and does something shocking and sometimes violent. It mars that special space of a thousand desired needlepricks she so carefully laces.

She knows this. So in this movie, a study really, she focuses on the ending. Everything is designed to give her a real ending, one that sets those needles and leaves them in after you leave the theater. Good for her. This and "Sex is Comedy" shows that she is surrounding her own limitations in public essays. Taken together, they're powerful stuff.

The story here is a woman and a boy, and a dance, an episode and then an ending that reveals intentions.

This is hard work all of this. You need to know something of her other work, of her life. And of the bankrupt nature of French film-making right now, and the analogies some make with the impossibilities that real love can exist.

Also some notion of how we build desire in our lives, the immediate part, out of cinematic components to be eaten as it it were a meal.

Yes, it is hard work. And you'll have to live through lots of bad endings. Like life, like love.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

These two actors (Sarah Pratt & Gilles Guillain ) previously unknown to me are just brilliant. Occupying the screen for most of the time their film characters are revealed to us through a series of conversations. Casually meeting on an overnight ferry bound for Portsmouth, Thomas a teenager and Alice a married woman exchange shy glances at first as they sit at the same table in the ship's cafeteria.

The feelings between the two grow more intimate as the night wears on. Alice finds Thomas so naive and innocent. He acknowledges he hasn't done so well at school but hopes to become a plastic surgeon because women are so concerned about their appearance and there's money in it. Alice is very critical about men in general claiming they are selfish and only have one thing in mind. She says she has just walked out on her husband.

It is interesting to watch Thomas trying to look and act older and Alice (letting down her hair ) trying to look younger. Alice is in a seductive mood and uses her womanly experience to snare him into her cabin. Shutting out the world they are now free to act without any inhibitions.

All scenes are beautifully handled by the director who is obviously devoted to detail. All scenes are believable. Alice always critical and somewhat cold seems to be constantly in control, while Thomas begins to be carried away by his emotions. To him Alice seems to be more desirable by the minute.

Finally there is the disembarkation scene. You think you know how it will all end, do you? Well think again. Life is never simple. Life can have its disappointments.

It was my intention to record this film for later viewing but I became so absorbed at the beginning I watched it right through. It is so pleasing to find a film that is so rewarding. Highly recommended.